research- article20202020

940690 SMSXXX10.1177/2056305120940690Social Media <span class="symbol" cstyle="Mathematical">+</span> SocietyMorris

Abstract

SI: Platforms and Cultural Productions

Music Platforms and the Social Media + Society

July-September 2020: 1–10

Optimization of Culture © The Author(s) 2020

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sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/2056305120940690
https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120940690 journals.sagepub.com/home/sms

Jeremy Wade Morris

Drawing on Mark Katz’s notion of phonographic effects—where musicians, during the advent of early recording
technology, altered their style of play to be better captured by microphones—this article explores some of the
“platform effects” that arise in the shift to platformization and how cultural goods and user practices are re-formatted
in the process. In particular, I examine the case of the music streaming service Spotify to think through the variety of
means, sonic, and otherwise, that artists, labels, and other platform stakeholders use to “optimize” music to respond
to the pressures platformization creates. I develop a typology of strategies—sonic optimization, data optimization, and
infrastructural optimization—to consider the creative and logistical challenges optimization poses for platforms, artists,
and users alike. From creating playlist friendly songs to musical spam to artificial play counts, I use the blurry lines these
cases create to explore the tensions between the competing needs of platform providers, content producers, and
users. I argue that music, as data, adds pressure on musicians and producers to think and act like software developers
and coders, treating their music not just as songs that need to reach listeners, but as an intermingling of sonic content
and coded metadata that needs to be prepared and readied for discovery. This optimization of culture, and the
pressures it creates, affects not just musicians, but content producers of all kinds (e.g., video, podcasts, apps, books,
etc.) who are forced to negotiate their relationships digital culture and the platforms through which it circulates.

Keywords
music, optimization, streaming services, platformization

“As it turns out, you’re doing it wrong if you want to make money in producers to make a “Spotify song” (Pelly, 2018): music that
music by being a musician.”—(Peter Filimore qtd. in Pauli, 2013) seems sonically optimized for Spotify’s platform and for the
various listening occasions and environments for which users turn
to Spotify for sonic accompaniment.
“Spotify-core.” “Streambait.” Two neologisms, recently written Most discussions around Spotify-core or streambait try
into existence by music critics trying to grapple with the effects somewhat fruitlessly to define them musically:
of streaming services on musical culture (Caramanica, 2018;
Pelly, 2018), raise interesting questions about the role of [it] has this soft, emo-y, cutesy thing to it, [ . . . ] really minimal and
platforms in the distribution of digital cul based around just a few simple elements in verses. Often a snap in the
tural goods. Like “hardcore techno” or “mumblecore” films, verses. And then the choruses sometimes employ vocal samples.
“Spotify-core” suggests a stylistic or genre relationship between (Music Producer, qtd. in Pelly, 2018)
the songs that pervade today’s most dominant music streaming
service. Similarly, streambait draws a comparison to click-bait A playlist on Spotify called “Spotifycore: Songs for and by
headlines; music that seems designed almost to manipulate users Algorithms” contains songs ranging so widely in style,
into streaming it. Both terms are, using Liz Pelly’s (2018) words,
“shorthand for music that sounds tai
University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
lored to streaming,” but they are also loaded, not-so-subtle
critiques of a broad swath of (pop) music that sounds similar Corresponding Author:
enough to have been crafted by algorithms for “data-driven Jeremy Wade Morris, Media and Cultural Studies, Department of
systems of mood-enhancing background music.” At a time, when Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Vilas Hall Rm 6132,
there is more music than ever vying for listeners’ ears, 821 University Ave., Madison, WI 53706, USA.
the terms underscore the increasing pressures for artists and Email: jwmorris2@wisc.edu
 Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
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distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages
(https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
sound, and popularity it is hard to see any coherence.1 Rather than
getting caught up in definitional idiosyncracies though, this
article uses the ideas of songs and sounds being tailored for a
platform to investigate the variety of means, sonic, and otherwise,
that artists, labels, and other platform stakehold
ers use to “optimize” music to respond to the pressures plat
formization creates.
In particular, this article questions how some musicians and
songs get seen, heard, and amplified by the discovery
mechanisms on platforms while others get buried in a sea of
content. Drawing on recent literature on platformization and on
examples of “optimization,” I explore cases of “platform effects”
and how they reformat cultural goods as a result. Using the case
of Spotify and the ways artists, producers, and marketers optimize
their music for the platform—through sonic optimization, data
optimization, and infrastructural optimization—this article
enumerates a typology of tech niques and considers when these
tactics are perceived as legitimate or illegitimate uses of the
platform either by users or the platform provider. Treating
optimization as an evolu
tion of historical dynamics of media production, I consider the
creative and logistical challenges optimization poses for
platforms, artists, and users alike. From creating playlist friendly
songs to musical spam or artificial play counts, I use the blurry
lines these cases create to explore the competing needs of
platform providers, content producers, and users. I argue that
music, as data, adds pressure on musicians and producers to think
and act like software developers, treating their music not just as
songs that need to reach listeners, but as an intermingling of sonic
content and coded metadata that needs to be prepared and readied
for discovery.
Ultimately, these practices are bigger than just music. Crafting
sounds that conform to some elusive genre label like “Spotify-
core” is, I argue, just one of many related tac tics and strategies
aimed at optimizing culture across a num ber of platforms. The
examples I draw on, while extreme, are templates for the ways
content producers of all kinds (e.g., video, podcasts, apps, books,
etc.) are forced to negotiate their relationships with digital culture
and the platforms through which it circulates. Through sonic, data
and infra structural optimization, the case of music offers an initial
sketch of how cultural goods are being optimized for plat forms,
of the tensions and pressures this introduces for users, artists, and
platform providers, as well as of the effects on the very form and
experience of the cultural commodities being circulated.
Platform Effects
The cultural industries continue to experience ongoing after
shocks in the light of digitization. While the early stages of this
transition were marked by concerns about the digitiza tion of
individual products or cultural commodities, digitiza tion has now
extended to all facets of the industries themselves. Not only is
music that was once available in
more routine and necessary components of music distribu tion,
musicians, artists, and the companies that share content on these
platforms gradually learn a variety of tools, strate gies, and tricks
for standing out in these crowded environments.
Of course, the physical retail environment has long dic tated
2 Social Media + Society
physical retail packages like CDs or cassette tapes, digital, but so
too are the means of accessing, discovering, acquiring, and using
those goods (Anderson, 2014; Burkart & McCourt, 2006). While
the transition to digital goods brought fears of an industry
potentially decimated by piracy (Knopper, 2009) and excitement
about musical meritocracies and healthy long tails of success for
independent and mainstream artists alike (Anderson, 2006), the
aftermath has shone a more nuanced light on the workings of
industrial power and control during a time of technological
change (Leyshon, 2014; Morris, 2015a). Music’s new
intermediaries (e.g., Spotify, Apple, Google) increasingly operate
in the same way music labels or retailers did: as cultural markets
where a relatively few artists achieve widespread exposure, while
artists in the sup posed long-tail compete for what little listener
attention and royalty payments remain (Hviid et al., 2018; Negus,
2019).
As with other cultural goods, music now circulates in a
“stack”-like environment (Bratton, 2016) that combines pro
duction, promotion, circulation, and consumption all in one
service, rather than at distinct distribution points (i.e., a prod uct is
produced in a factory, sold at retail, used at consumer’s home). A
single device, like a phone, now integrates all these previously
separate moments. The platforms that have emerged to mediate
the circulation of cultural commodities— Spotify, YouTube, App
Stores, and so on—exert significant influence in shaping the
content users discover, and how users discover content, through
algorithmic recommendations, human-curated or editorial
suggestions, or more passive forms of content presentation, like
interface organization and navigation (Gillespie, 2010, 2018a;
Nieborg & Poell, 2018). In other words, “platform capitalism”
(Srnicek, 2017) begets the “platformization of cultural production
[ . . . with] new economic and managerial strategies” (Nieborg &
Poell, 2018, p. 4281) where platforms “govern” the production
and circu lation of cultural goods either through the explicit
policies, rules, and guidelines they impose (i.e., no explicit
material, no hate speech, etc.) or the more hidden acts of
infrastructural and algorithmic politics (Gillespie, 2010, 2018a).
Ultimately, this leads to a shift in the infrastructure of cultural
production. Platforms and the content that passes through them,
like music, adapts to ensure that content is “contingent, modular
ized, constantly altered, and optimized for platform moneti zation”
(Nieborg & Poell, 2018, pp. 7–8).
In other words, producers of cultural content are depen dent on,
and their products contingent on, the goals, features, and business
models of the platform. Platforms also render commodities
contingent since the commodities that appear on these platforms
are regularly in need of updating (Nieborg & Poell, 2018, p. 15).
Like software developers who must con tinually release new
updates to their apps to maintain a pre ception of newness and
relevance for consumers (Chun, 2016; Simon, 2018), musicians
also face similar pressures to continually update their artist pages,
to release new tracks, and to maintain an active online presence to
stay current and visible with fans (Baym, 2018). As these
platforms become
Morris 3
the ways cultural products appeared in stores; one only has to
think of how newspaper publishers designed headline banners to
stand out in vendor stands (Cooke, 2005), how movie studios
adjusted the aesthetics and story lines of films based on
distribution technologies (Benson-Allott, 2013) or of how
Walmart’s strong-arm pricing and display strategies shape how
product manufacturers approach their businesses. Similarly,
musicians and labels have had to consider whether to include
offensive content on their albums, since stores like Walmart have,
historically, had policies against stocking CDs with Parental
Advisory Warning stickers (Fox, 2005). Platforms are a digital
evolution of these affordances; one where the display, discovery,
search, and consumption of a cultural good all take place through
a software search bar and digital database rather than at multiple
points in the distribu tion chain. As a result, new tactics for
standing out and new effects on musical cultures are emerging.
We might think of the various responses to these condi tions of
contingency as “platform effects,” building on Mark Katz’s
(2004) idea of phonograph effects. Katz (2004) uses the term to
describe the subtle ways technologies of record ing influence the
production of music, such as the ways musicians during the
advent of early recording technology altered their style of play to
be better captured by then-new studio microphones (pp. 85–93).
Increased use of vibrato by violinists, or different kinds of close-
mic singing styles by vocalists created more accurate—or rather,
more desired and trendy—reproduction of sounds and music, so
musicians internalized these new techniques in their styles of play
and performance.
We can hear echoes of Katz’s concept when we examine the
ways contemporary creators design their songs in more modular,
remixable ways, or when they encode files based on
psychoacoustic models for optimal sound transmission and
reduced files sizes (Sterne, 2012), or in arguments about how
artists are increasingly creating “sync-friendly” music for
television shows, commercials, and video games by writ
ing songs with certain lyrics (e.g., “smile,” “sunshine”) or moods
(e.g., happy, upbeat; Meier, 2016, pp. 120–121). When critics
posit that today’s music sounds like “Spotify core” (Pelly, 2018),
or that digital platforms like Spotify, which only pays royalties on
streams that last for more than 30s, are forcing musicians and
producers to create shorter songs with quirkier vocal effects (e.g.,
auto-tune) and other attention-getting sounds much sooner in the
song (Haynes, 2017; Léveillé Gauvin, 2018; Reynolds, 2018),
they are essentially describing platform effects.2
Platform effects, then, are by no means new. Just as the move
from mono to stereo (or quadrophonic) recording
afforded new ways to record and mix music, technology has
always been intertwined with the content and form of cul tural
goods. The examples earlier, and those that follow, show that
musicians and producers, as they have always done, are adjusting
their practices to the platforms and envi ronments in which their
music appears, circulates, and plays. As Robert Prey’s (2020)
research about how artists orient their music toward inclusion on
their information selected as relevant will tend to orient themselves
toward these algorithmic systems, to make themselves
algorithmically recognizable, in the hopes of being amplified by
them. (Gillespie, 2017, p. 64, emphasis mine)
Taina Bucher (2012) calls this “the pursuit of visibility,”
Kelley Cotter (2019) speaks of “playing the visibility game” and
Anne Helmond (2015) calls it being “platform ready”; all terms
which point to how content creators, marketers, users, and other
stakeholders use their acquired knowledge, resources, and myths
about how algorithms work to help manipulate their content in
such a way that it is rewarded with greater visibility.
There is a fine and blurry line, though, between making
oneself or one’s content “algorithmically recognizable” and
optimization that goes too far, or that goes against a plat form’s
policies or the conventions of use of its stakeholders and users.
Practices that contravene such conventions are usually seen as
threats or unwelcome and often dismissed as spamming, gaming,
featured playlists shows, musicians, producers, and other
stakeholders are learning the rules of music distribution in an era
of digital consumption and trying to optimize their songwriting
and song production practices accordingly. While the concept of
phonograph effects reminds us that platform effects are not
necessarily new, it also points us to a time when it seemed easier
to sepa rate music (and musical cultures) from the deluge of data
and information we now call content. My argument here, then, is
not to create a definitive (and overly deterministic) list of
platform effects. Instead, I want to examine how the tech niques of
standing out are becoming increasingly computa tional, and rely
on an intermingling of code and content in ways that push
musicians, labels, and other stakeholders to think more like data
curators: experts at optimizing content, code, and metadata in a
quest for a platform ready product.
Resetting Optimization
Media researchers are far more used to the language of opti
mization when we discuss goods that are more obviously
computational. We are familiar with search engine optimiza tion
(SEO) and the readying of content through keywords, metadata,
and code to make it more amenable for discovery (Van
Couvering, 2004). Previous media practices like send ing press
releases to news organizations or crafting easy-to quote soundbites
for journalists are precursors to current day optimization efforts
(Gillespie, 2017, p. 64), though there is less of a direct connection
between the content and mechanics of the search and discovery
process when compared to digital interfaces. Optimization of
digital content can seem innocu ous and technical—foregrounding
certain keywords, tweak ing metadata to make sites search-
friendly or building links from other websites—but optimization
also involves highly curated and engineered efforts to present
doctored search results as organic or natural, giving the practice
shadowy and duplicitous connotations (Ziewitz, 2017). As
Fenwick McKelvey (2019) argues, “the technical connotations of
opti
mization obscure its social and political implications.” Platform
providers do set broad terms for what appears in their search
results or recommendation algorithms, but they are not the only
ones who determine what appears or not on their platforms.
Companies, users, content producers, and so on, each work to
design content so that it might attain visibil ity on any given
platform:
Precisely because information algorithms make judgments that can
have powerful consequences, those interested in having
4 Social Media + Society
or faking. They are, as Finn Brunton (2019) so aptly describes
spam, “like unexpectedly blowing a vuvuzela in the middle of a
conversation” (p. 565). While spam and its ilk can be playful and
harmless or designed explicitly to exploit, hurt, or steal
information, both trivial and serious cases of spamming, gaming,
faking, and so on, are, like acts of optimization, intentionally
about turning technological systems inward on themselves.
Spamming, gaming, and optimization, then, often exist on the
same spectrum. Are there easy distinctions we can make between
“simple” SEO and more questionable techniques that platform
owners and stakeholders should not tolerate? The line between
what is acceptable optimization and what is not is a shadowy
boundary that gets drawn and redrawn depending on the case
(e.g., targeted advertising, which is acceptable vs. google
bombing, which is generally frowned upon but playful, vs. more
overt search manipulation, which is purged and penalized). As
Gillespie (2017), drawing on Brunton notes, “spam is whatever is
defined away as illegiti mate by the mechanisms designed to do
so” (p. 67). Making these distinctions, then, is ultimately a
question of power: a cultural debate about distinguishing
acceptable practices from unacceptable ones and about who has
the power to decide (Gillespie, 2017). Rather than some
objectively mea surable characteristic though, the legitimacy of
any act of optimization depends on the perspective of those
empowered to make and enforce those decisions (Petre et al.,
2019). As platform custodians draw their fuzzy lines around what
is and is not acceptable, they reveal that “moderation is the
essence of platforms” (Gillespie, 2018b, p. 201) and point to the
asymmetrical power they wield in the curation and dis covery of
content.
Platformization, however, is not solely a top-down pro cess where
platforms set the terms and conditions for the cir culation of
culture and all users and stakeholders are left to merely respond
(Greenberg, 2010; Pinch, 2002). Platforms
bring the conflicting agendas and motivations of platform
providers, content creators, retailers, users, and more into the
same space and the result is a dynamic and always shifting set of
relationships and practices. It is true that platforms have unequal
power to set boundaries for cultural products and that there is “a
double-standard [that] emerges from this normative boundary
work: tactics that are valorized as inno
vative when practiced by platforms [ . . . ] are portrayed as unduly
manipulative—even corrupt—when deployed by cultural
producers” (Petre et al., 2019, p. 9). But the exam ples I explore in
the next section highlight the push and pull of this negotiated
relationship: they are small breeches in the boundaries platform
providers have established and proof that technical systems can
be gamed, and music can be opti mized, in ways that provoke
responses from users, platform providers, and other platform
stakeholders.
The major music labels and rights organizations have his
torically regulated practices about what were acceptable and
unacceptable retail practices, usually through punitive mea sures
earlier, I argue this optimization is not just a question about being
seen or heard on specific platforms; it is also a question about the
nature of cultural experiences when there is a deliberate re-
configuration of the content and characteristics of cultural goods.
By developing an initial typology for how optimization takes
place for music—sonically, through meta
data, or infrastructurally—I hope to spur similar categoriza tion
from researchers investigating other cultural goods. After all, the
cases here are but a fraction of the optimization practices that are
shaping a much larger swath of cultural production now that so
many cultural goods are reducible to (or have been reduced to)
data. If optimization is “politics by other means” (McKelvey,
2019), then unpacking the strate gies cultural producers and
platform stakeholders use in the optimization of culture—as well
as the responses of platform providers to the same—has much to
tell us about the politics of the platformized circulation of digital
culture.
Fake Artists and Sonic Optimization
Sonic optimization involves re-tuning the sonic features or a
song, album, or playlist to meet the (perceived) affordances of a
platform. This tactic was most recently at the heart of a minor
controversy, in the summers of 2016 and 2017, when a number of
investigative reports surfaced about the presence of “fake” artists
on Spotify (Ingham, 2017; Raymond, 2017). These “artists”
seemed to have no presence outside Spotify’s ecosystem—no
websites, no public profile, no record of per formances, no true
albums just singles, and so on—and existed solely as musical
against piracy, counterfeit CDs, and other violations of
intellectual property (Kernfeld, 2011). While the cases below are
not quite counterfeit products or pirated sheet music, the practices
for increasing visibility, discoverability, and audi bility on Spotify
that I explore in the next section fall uncom fortably between
definitional gaps of optimization, spam, fakes, clones, and so on.
They each focus on different facets of optimization, but they raise
similar concerns about how musicians and other platform
stakeholders are increasingly facing pressures to act as software
developers and visibility engineers, in addition to their roles as
musicians and sound creators. Musicians and producers shift, as
Negus (2019) notes, from “creator of a product to curator of
content.”
Lessons in Optimization From the
Fakers, Spammers, and Cloners
Each case below is connected by how they exemplify what I have
come to call the optimization of culture: the strategic preparation
and readying of cultural goods to orient them toward and ready
them circulation, discovery, and use on particular platforms.
Whether it is musicians tailoring con
tent to be playlist friendly on streaming services, marketing
companies artificially boosting the number of plays an artist they
represent receives, software developers building clones of popular
programs to capitalize on trending apps, or click
bait headline writers directing traffic toward web content, there is
a growing assemblage of organizations and individu als across the
cultural industries who find ways to manipu late digital platforms
for economic or cultural gains. As these platforms become
primary means of distribution, content producers, marketers,
users, and platforms themselves all engage in creative (and
sometimes unsanctioned) practices to take advantage of platform
affordances, whether that be for making content more visible, or
realizing greater profits. Building on Helmond, Bucher, Gillespie,
and others reviewed
Morris 5
fodder used to fill out Spotify’s mood-based playlists. Under
names like Ana Olgica (23.5 million plays), Charlie Key (23.6
million plays), Lo Mimieux (22.3 million plays), and others, these
artists were racking up millions of streams through Spotify-
curated playlists like Peaceful Piano, Music for Concentration or
Piano and Chill. The reports set off debates about why Spotify
would support and promote these “fake” artists and what the
repercussions were for major and independent labels and artists
(e.g., Deahl & Singleton, 2017; Flanagan, 2017). Spotify was, the
reports argued, commissioning these artists directly and working
out special licensing rates with them, thereby saving money on
the steep royalty fees Spotify would normally pay the labels.
Spotify typically pays royalties based on a percentage of the total
revenue that has come in for all artists, so more popular artists
receive a larger share than artists who have fewer streams. In this
case, “real” artists and record labels com plained that the presence
of a large number of fake artists earning royalties in any given
period meant fewer royalties for other artists on the platform.
Spotify, for its part, responded by claiming: “We do not and have
never created ‘fake’ artists and put them on Spotify playlists.
Categorically untrue, full stop” (Spotify executive, qtd. in
Gensler, 2017).
Most of the artists under investigation in the articles turned out
to be “real” people; a large number of them were aliases of a
handful of actual musicians, or companies that excelled
at creating low-key atmospheric music that was perfectly tai lored
for and optimized to fit on Spotify’s mood-based playl ists. They
were intentionally designing their own version of “Spotify-core,”
crafting songs that would serve as playlist bait. Given that Spotify
 relies heavily on algorithmic tech nologies to automate the
analysis of musical similarities and group them into playlists (for
more, see Eriksson, 2016; Morris, 2015b), these artists were
crafting sonic content that would be algorithmically discoverable
even though it was sonically unremarkable. These artists
understood the platform on which they were distributing their
music relied less on tra ditional genre, artist persona, or the album
format as drivers for musical categorization and more on mood,
tone, and lis
tening occasion, so they created their music accordingly. The
controversy provoked a number of questions about definitions of
“fake” versus “real” artists (Flanagan, 2017; Petridis, 2017;
Turner, 2017) but what matters more, I would argue, is that
Spotify’s response was to deny involvement and to allow the
continued presence of these artists rather than to remove them
from the platform. For Spotify, the fact that the dozens of “fake”
artists in question were actually a handful of composers and
songwriters who built songs pur posefully designed for particular
playlists did not mean they were subverting the platform’s
policies or detracting from the overall ecosystem. Users, labels,
and other musicians may have been irked by their strategies, by
the quality of their music, or by the possibility that these popular
“fake” artists might be eroding the pool of royalty payments to go
around, but unless Spotify was actually paying itself by own ing
the rights of the works of these “fake” artists—a claim which was
name of a popular artist or the title of a trending song (D’onfro,
2014). So, if a user searches for “Be Humble,” looking for
Kendrick Lamar’s 2017 hit “HUMBLE.,” they might find King
Stitch’s rendition of “Be Humble” instead. A user looking for
Carly Rae Jepsen’s hit song “Call Me Maybe” can just as easily
find the band Call Me Maybe with one click. Almost any popular
contemporary song has a series of clones and copies designed to
trick users into play ing secondary versions of songs, most of them
not properly licensed and thus generating royalties for the cloner
and not the cloned. Some clones are not even songs; they are
often just 30s of white noise or a commercial (Walsh, 2016).
Cloners join a host of artists who, rather than stealing other
people’s ideas and music, create original tunes of their own and
use brute force to get their songs heard. Knowing that the limit of
songs per albums that Spotify will allow is 100, some artists
create huge discographies, each release with close to 100 songs
with different titles, despite the fact that many of the songs are
sonically identi
cal. One such spammer, Sir Juan Mutant, gave one of their tracks
“nine different names, on the same album” (Mandel, 2013) and
my examination of Mutant’s discography reveals over 68 albums
in a 5-year period from 2005–2010, with over 50 of those
released in 2010 alone. At 100 songs per album that is close to
7,000 songs and song titles, each with potential keywords that
seem designed to come up in every
day searches. Another notorious musical overproducer is Matt
Farley, who has made a name (or rather, multiple names) for
himself by releasing over 14,000 short impro vised songs under
60 different aliases (D’onfro, 2014; McConnell, 2014). Most of
his song titles seem to be the epitome of keyword optimization,
stuffed with references to current events and celebrities (e.g.,
“Everybody Loves Kendall Jenner,” “Andre Young is a Hip Hop
Doctor,” and “You, Jake Gyllenhaal, Are a Movie Star Man”).
There are also countless “Happy Birthday” artists on Spotify who
provide a customized birthday song for your child or friend,
whatever their name. Farley, Mutant, and the birthday sing
ers operate at a scale that seems designed for a service that
reaches millions but only pays fractions of pennies for indi vidual
streams. Farley, for example, estimates his costs for releasing an
album hover around US$50, yet in some years his massive
floated but never proven—then it seemed the art ists in question
were still playing by the platform’s rules. The optimization, in
this case, is taking place at the sonic level and given that sounds
are more subjective and less easy to quantify, as the debates over
Spotify-core suggest, the opti mization is subtle enough that it not
only persists on the plat form, but thrives through inclusion on
playlists and recommendations. As Prey’s (2020) research
confirms, art ists are increasingly orienting their music making
strategies toward sounds they think will succeed on the platform,
or toward inclusion on playlists that are seen are influential nodes
in musical discovery.
Cloners, Spammers, and (Meta)Data
Optimization
(Meta)Data optimization is more similar to traditional forms of
SEO, and involves not so much altering sonic content, but
discoverability through search and other platform interface
features. Looking at artists that have been described as
“Spammers, Fakers, and Cloners” (Mandel, 2013), we see
instances where Spotify is not as supportive of the “fake” artists
who are trying to optimize through (meta)data means. Musical
cloners trick algorithms (and sometimes, users) by naming
themselves after popular search terms, such as the
6 Social Media + Society
catalog brings in hundreds of thousands of dol lars (McConnell,
2014). Unlike the cloners earlier, artists like Farley and Mutant
do make original creations, even if they subvert the expectations
of traditional songs, so Spotify leaves some of their music on its
platform. But it is clear that these artists have tried to optimize
their discogra phies for maximum discovery and profit using
metadata. Whether through a barrage of keywords, the use of
trending song and artist names, or renaming the same songs, each
of these tracks has specially, and specifically, crafted metadata to
meet the affordances and features of the platform on which they
exist.
Gamers and Infrastructural Optimization
Infrastructural optimization refers to the process of exploiting the
ways platforms work at their most fundamental level to increase
the visibility or value of certain content. This may involve
elements of both sonic and/or (meta)data optimiza
tion, but in these instances, actors looking to optimize perfor
mance of particular songs or artists try to game the platform
through its very infrastructure by artificially boosting the play
counts of an album, song, or artist, by employing bots or
manipulating royalty payouts. Examples of this kind of “click
fraud” are rampant, and they range from comical to illegal. I have
described the efforts of the band Vulfpeck elsewhere (Morris,
2018), who released an album called Sleepify with 10 songs on it
that were each 30 seconds of complete silence (Track 1 is called,
Z; Track 2, Zz; Track 3, Zzz; etc.), and implored fans to stream
the album on repeat for the entire night as they slept. Since
royalties on Spotify begin after 30s, this triggered a high number
of paid plays over a 5- to 7-hr period. Though Sleepify was
largely a public relations (PR) stunt to garner the band some
attention (Jonze, 2014), the band received US$20,000 before
being removed from the platform (Goldman, 2014). Similarly, in
2013, a security analyst named Peter Filimore released an album
of “ear-piercing garbage” made from mash-ups of bad MIDI
music and public domain audio to show the flaws in Spotify’s
royalty pay out system. He created three bots to “simulate three
listeners playing his songs 24hr a day for a month” (Pauli, 2013)
and netted himself over US$1000 in the process. More serious
cases of “click fraud” have followed in Filimore’s wake: a
 Bulgarian playlist maker falsely boosted the amount of listeners
for several of their playlists, resulting in hundreds of thousands of
dollars being paid out (Ingham, 2018), fans of Korean pop group
BTS launched a sophisticated international network of dummy
accounts to boost the play counts of the band’s debut album
(Montgomery, 2018), and the app Streamify promises to boost
play counts and playlist placements for its clients, likely through
a combination of bots and purchased/commissioned listening
(Herstand, 2017; Sanchez, 2017).
A team of media studies researchers in Sweden has similarly
been probing the limits of Spotify’s platform (Eriksson et al.,
2019). Among other “interventions” in their “Spotify Teardown,”
the team created a pseudo record label with a num
listener behavior in such a way that it becomes impossible to
distinguish between a human and a machine?” (Eriksson et al.,
2019, p. 76).
Spotify does react and remove some of the more flagrant
violations on its platforms—including sending a cease and desist
letter to Eriksson et. al.’s research team—but the ratio nales they
provide for doing so often hint at judgment calls that extend far
beyond the technical. For example, one artist who was
purposefully gaming Spotify’s royalty payout scheme by
repeatedly playing his own music received the following notice
from the digital distribution service which help placed his music
on Spotify:
[Your song was removed] because the song was streamed a massive
number of times, but by a tiny number of people. Real people don’t
listen to the same exact song thousands of times in a row. So it looks
to Spotify like you were trying to trick them in to paying royalties for
fake listens. (Distrokid email, qtd. in Walsh, 2016)
Spotify’s invocation of “real people” here is ironic since, in
this case, the user in question was, indeed, a real person rather
than a bot even if they were listening slightly unrealis tically
(Walsh, 2016). In its efforts to stamp out frauds and bots,
Spotify’s policies then also start to shape what counts as “real”
listening or “real” listeners.
Spotify’s stated goal is to decrease the presence of spam ming,
faking and cloning, and gaming on their platform, osten sibly to
allow proper artists their proper compensation and to more
quickly and efficiently provide the music users are look ing for.
Platforms, in other words, engage in their own version of
optimization: “Another reason [decreasing spam] matters to us is
that our systems are always optimized for real-world music”
(Mandel, 2013). Platform providers want to optimize their
systems for “real”-world music but, in doing so, they have to
make decisions both about what constitutes unreal content (i.e.,
duplicate songs, songs that spoof other popular artists or song
titles, etc.) as well as unreal practices (i.e., repeated plays of a
single song or artist, etc.) even if there are “real” people behind
that content and those practices. For many of the pro ducers and
artists making music in what they might call the “real” world,
tactics Spotify deems as inappropriate are simply efforts to
optimize content and visibility to succeed on Spotify’s platform.
Whether it is sonic, (meta)data, or infrastructural optimization,
these are platform effects that come from the increasing pressure
to achieve visibility in a service that pres ents an overwhelming
amount of content and offers only algo rithms, search indexes, and
other software technologies for navigating that content. While
they may range in purpose, damage, and intent—fans of Vulfpeck
might see their experi ment as humorous or subversive, while the
playlist hacker is more apt to be seen as a criminal—the examples
are all attempts to do the very thing that Spotify was built to do:
connect artists with a global audience of listeners in an attempt to
monetize a massive network of music listening activities.
ber of album releases, each designed to test various aspects of
Spotify’s infrastructure. With guiding questions such as “Who or
what decides what counts—or does not count—as music on
Spotify?” the team has been peeling back some of the layers
masking Spotify’s infrastructure by creating “fake” songs made
up of breakfast-time sounds collected in a coffee shop, software
plugins like “Songblocker” that gives users a version of Spotify
that only plays its ads, and listening bots designed to boost play
counts (Eriksson et al., 2019, p. 72). Their reverse engineering
underlines how blurry the lines between legitimate user prac tices
and unsanctioned machinic ones are. As they ask, “what happens
when—not if—streaming bots approximate human
Morris 7
The Optimization of Culture
Peter Filimore, the security analyst who gamed Spotify’s royalty
payout system, noted “you’re doing it wrong if you want to make
money in music by being a musician” (qtd. in Pauli, 2013).
Although he and his album of mashed up public domain audio,
were both firmly tongue-in-cheek, his obser
vation that making music, or having a good song is only part of
the equation is worth reflecting on. While this has argu ably been
true throughout the history of recorded music if we consider the
role promotion and publicity play in the making of popular music,
we are now witnessing the platform-spe cific tactics that emerge in
an era where software and plat forms govern the discovery of
cultural goods and content. As the production and circulation of
music takes on the charac teristics and features of software
through digitization, musi cians, and labels become more like
software developers, building songs to match particular content
needs and trigger particular algorithmic variables. Artists must
now think of song titles and lyrics not just as signatures of their
creative processes, but as keywords that might direct traffic to
their content. Many fans likely now understand their activities not
solely as acts of fandom for artists they enjoy, but as part of a
larger process of engineering popularity through play counts.
Marketers typically now consider bots and other arti ficial ways of
boosting play counts as simply part of the price of taking part in
crowded platforms. Just as Katz noted with vibrato techniques, or
Meier found with sync-friendly songs and lyrics, knowing what
works musically will remain an important skill, but knowing
technically how to surface that music, to make it discoverable on
digital platforms is equally crucial. Given that digital music is a
combination of sound, descriptive metadata about sound, and data
that have been extracted from sound, those invested in its
circulation have to consider not just melodies, beats, instruments,
and key changes make up a song, but also what descriptors, key
words, and sonic data would make a song visible and audible
to algorithms, search indexes, and platform interfaces. Music
platforms are often at a loss to react in a timely and consistent
manner to the various forms of platform interven tions listed
earlier. This may be due to a lack of resources (in terms of staff,
computing power, etc.) devoted to finding and moderating clones,
spam, and fakes, but it may also be because, in many ways,
platforms benefit from the additional content and from the
plethora of options they provide for users. For music, Spotify,
Apple Music, and other such plat forms pride themselves on, and
regularly compete around, the number of songs they provide in
their catalogs.3 The larger the catalog, the more opportunity there
is for services to gather more data and information about their
users. When each play of a song or keyword search feeds more
valuable data back to the platform provider, there is only an
incentive to limit content when the data it returns are actively
harmful to the service’s goals and objectives. This is why Spotify
reacts more strongly, in the cases examined here, against

instances of infrastructural optimization, when compared to sonic
or data optimization. Infrastructural interventions are more
serious threats to the platform because they detract from the
platform’s overall objectives in ways that threaten the ser
vice (usually financially) and in ways that the other forms of
optimization do not (or at least not at the same scale). Sonic
optimization and data optimization may result in slight user
annoyances or think-pieces about how Spotify produces Spotify-
core, but the extra songs and artists on the platform provide more
data and content for Spotify to deploy, track, and monitor.
Platforms, it seems, can fully accommodate (and even encourage)
iterations on what is popular, whether those are spammy or
derivative iterations or innovative ones, since users are often
searching for what is popular, and each search yields new data
and interactions around music.
The line platform providers must draw is thus both a con
ceptual and definitional one about what counts as acceptable or
not, as well as a self-interested and strategic one about what data
are being generated by the presence of certain con tent on their
platforms and how valuable these data are. On Spotify, copycats,
endless birthday songs, and other attempts at visibility, like Matt
Farley’s extensive catalog, are part of a business model these
artists are pursuing to support their efforts to make a sustainable
wage given the economics and affordances of music streaming
services. They may be a nui sance, but if they generate useable
data, they are still valu able. These optimization practices, then,
are a symptom of, and solution to, the platformized distribution
of cultural con tent. In an era where platforms need as much
content as pos sible to differentiate themselves from competing
platforms, and where cheap and accessible technologies are
available for the creation of cultural goods, there is very little
down side, for platforms or content producers, for producing fake,
clone, or spam songs. At worst, these efforts become trial
experiments of what behaviors, practices, and content plat forms
will allow. In many cases though, they become signifi cant
sources of profit for those behind them. While it might seem—
aesthetically, morally, or subjectively—that cloners, fakers, and
spammers are simply exploiting or manipulating platforms, their
actions may also be viewed as rational deci sions within and
reactions to platform affordances and boundaries. Their actions
may raise concerns about eventual impacts on musical cultures,
users, other musicians, and even platform governance, but this
optimized music also continues to provide platforms with more
content and thus more potential for collecting data.
When retail stores were the key “platform” for music dis tribution
and SoundScan was the primary metric for judging success on
that platform, labels, and musicians found ways to try and boost
their sales numbers by making strategic pur chases in certain
regions and locations that were known to be important in chart
calculations (McCourt & Rothenbuhler, 1997). Since appearing
on Billboard’s charts or in the American Top 40 radio broadcast
was culturally meaningful, optimizing an artist’s potential to be
visible on these charts
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, author ship,
and/or publication of this article.
ORCID iD
Jeremy Wade Morris https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6419-0398
8 Social Media + Society
also mattered (Gillespie, 2016, p. 12). Similarly, appearing in
Spotify’s Rap Caviar Playlist, or in its search results lists mat ters
because Spotify presents these lists and placements as mattering,
and users employ them in their attempts to search and discover
new cultural content. In trying to make music algorithmically
recognizable and platform ready, the exam ples examined here are
all cases of various users and entities discovering which elements
of a platform matter (search interfaces, playlists, royalty pay out
policies, etc.) and then using sonic, metadata, and infrastructural
techniques to opti mize their content accordingly. Their tactics
may be blunt, annoying, unsanctioned, or in some cases, illegal,
but they highlight ways in which, whenever systems are
distributed, platform stakeholders orient their content toward
them. They underscore that because music, like other cultural
goods, is increasingly reducible to data, cultural producers face
pres sures to optimize the products of their labor in ways that
ensure both the content (the sounds, the visuals, etc.) and the
code (the metadata, keywords, etc.) promote discoverability.
The prevalence of these extreme cases of optimization show
how platform effects have already taken hold on the distribution
of culture. As media and cultural studies scholars continue to
explore how cultural goods (and producers, inter
mediaries, and users of those goods) respond to platformiza tion,
there is further empirical and qualitative research to be done on
how prevalent these kinds forms optimization are, on the
motivations behind these techniques, and on the impact of the
increasing burden on musicians and producers to optimize
culture. By examining the impact of sonic, (meta) data, and
infrastructural optimization, we can create typolo gies for the
different kinds of platform interventions that exist, and perhaps
begin the larger and more important con versations about the
impact of these practices on cultural production. The answer is
likely not as simple confirming or denying the existence of
“Spotify-core.” Rather, it will involve recognizing the variety of
levels at which optimiza tion takes place, and that optimization is
an unpredictable and uneven process. The optimization of
culture, after all, is a constant probing of the breeches, gaps, and
holes within a platform that allow for content to be discovered,
but it is also a series of questions about what users, producers,
and plat form providers find to be acceptable or not in the process
of sharing and distributing cultural goods.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank David Nieborg, Thomas Poell, and
Brooke Duffy for their editorial feedback throughout the various
iterations of this article. He would also like to acknowledge the helpful
comments from the anonymous reviewers and the many participants at
the wonderfully productive Platformization of Cultural Production
workshop in Toronto.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to
the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Morris 9
Notes
1. The playlist includes pop star Justin Bieber, electronic col laborators
The Chainsmokers, the Led Zeppelin-inspired Greta Van Fleet, and
the relatively unknown pianist Charlie Key among others. The
playlist is actually a meta-playlist by Australian media researcher
Ben Morgan, who uses the list to keep a running tally of all the
artists who have been accused in the popular press of belonging to
Spotify-core. I want to thank him for alerting me to the playlist and
for his thoughtful com ments on some of these ideas.
2. When radio was the dominant medium for the discovery of new music,
choruses, and hooks were placed throughout the song to catch the
attention of listeners skipping along the dial, but the shift to on-
demand audio has supposedly placed a premium on a song’s
beginning much like the cluttered digital news environment has
placed a premium on attention-getting “click-bait” headlines.
3. Current tag lines, as of 2018, for the services read “Apple Music: Lose
yourself in 50 million songs” “Spotify: Music for everyone.
Millions of Songs.,” “Google Play Music gives you millions of
songs and thousands of playlists for any situation.”
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Author Biography
Jeremy Wade Morris (PhD, McGill University) is an associate profes sor
of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin– Madison.
His research interests include sound and music technolo gies, software
and the appification of everyday life, and the podcasting
industry.